Life for sale here. Out every Tuesday - poster
The pattern
This still is filed under Keepable trade card.
Define
A small card people keep (pretty, useful, or collectible) that carries the brand after the encounter.
Mechanism
Retention object. The gift is the media. Recall is paid for by usefulness or delight, not by repetition.
Verdict
We can put a physical or digital keepable in someone's pocket and they will not throw it away.
Why it works
The card gives its largest and most valuable space to a free sample of the product rather than to a sales message, which is demonstration advertising in its purest retail form - the reader who laughs has already been sold. Restraining the headline to plain letterspaced roman is a deliberate refusal of poster shouting; the whitespace and quiet type signal the magazine's social register, which is itself part of what the buyer is paying for. Red is used only three times - the logotype, the publication day and nothing else - so the two facts a repeat buyer needs, the name and the day, pop out of an otherwise grey sheet. The joke itself is the positioning statement: a dry, mean, upper-class aside that tells a newsstand browser exactly whose humour this is.
Steal this when
Use this when the product's quality is instantly demonstrable in a small sample - a cartoon, a paragraph, a clip, a recipe. Print one complete real example at full size, keep the sales copy to a retail line and a price, and use one accent colour only for the name and the schedule.